LOS ANGELES — October 23, 2012 — Rubicon Project®, the leading digital advertising technology company for the comScore 500, reveals a look at the top global buying and selling activity on its real-time trading platform, REVV. In Rubicon Project’s first quarterly global Marketplace Report, top advertisers spending through real-time bidding included AT&T, American Express and Toyota. AT&T also topped the list for the U.S. market, but on that list American Express came fourth, after Toyota and Sprint.

In September, according to comScore, Rubicon Project’s REVV platform reached 96.9% of the U.S. Internet audience — providing buyers with the largest marketplace for quality inventory. As the largest reach platform in the digital advertising industry, REVV’s figures provide an accurate representation for the rapidly growing real-time-bidding market. The study also shows that the top five RTB categories around the world — the ones in which the most money is spent via RTB — are, in order, Technology & Computing, Personal Finance, Travel, Shopping and Automotive. Those are also the top five categories in the U.S., although the order differs slightly: Automotive places third here, followed by Travel, then Shopping.

“The RTB market is expected to reach $7 billion in the next five years in North America alone. The world’s biggest brands are using automated ad purchasing to more efficiently reach their target audiences across the world’s most premium web publishers,” said Frank Addante, founder and CEO of Rubicon Project. “As such, we’re fueling this market growth by enabling a single access point to the largest reaching marketplace of comScore 500 publishers who have installed Rubicon Project’s real time trading platform, REVV, to automate and optimize their ad sales operations.”

Among the report’s notable rankings:

Global RTB spending on the category of “news” dropped nearly 45% from the second quarter to the third.

Global RTB spending on the category of “careers” rose faster than any other category — nearly 39%.

The publishing vertical “shopping” leapt five places from the second quarter, pushing itself to #3.

Toyota Motor Corp., whose RTB spend in the U.S. finished 10th in the second quarter, surged to #2 for Q3 — a rise of 8 places.

The report also features RTB spending trends in Canada, Australia, France, Germany and the U.K.